Teaching marginalized kids taught me orderly classrooms, Western canon keys to liberation

Teaching marginalized kids taught me orderly classrooms, Western canon keys to liberation

Sohrab Ahmari, writing in the New York Post

"Do you know what would have happened if I'd told my Mexican-American students' moms, 'You know, ladies, I'm not teaching your children grammar, because grammar is an integral part of the white, phallocentric structures of ­oppression that keep you and your community down'?

"They would've slapped me with their purses and called me a pendejo -- and rightly so.

"The same would have gone for the notion, bizarrely gaining currency these days, that the yearning for order and even abstract reasoning as such are white, ­colonial constructs.

"I watched the best of my fellow teachers run tight ships, with clear expectations for behavior, systems of reward and punishment and a general ethic of uprightness pervading their classrooms. And, again, guess what? The kids, and their parents, appreciated such efforts enormously."